Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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Some plantation owners were fair, and their tenants were able to work their way off the
land and into better lives. The majority, unfortunately, kept their tenants tied to them
through debt. The crop never seemed to pay off the cost of the land rental, the mules, and
the supplies. The plantation owner would offer to lend the sharecropper money at high
interest rates to get through the next year, perpetuating a vicious cycle.
determination, you deal with a situation as long as you have to
There were white sharecroppers in the Delta, too. As musicologist and Mississippi native
n the thirties and
forties and mid-fifties in Arkansas as a sharecropper. A lot of people forget that there was
ever a white man in the Delta but it was the best place to go and work. If you was a black
person you could go and make a little
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Acco
What finally crashed the sharecropping syst
-reliance
on King Cotton. As the supply of cotton increased, its price fell, resulting in a spiral of
debt for both owners and sharecroppers in the 1880s and 1890s. The poverty among
sharecropping families became very severe. The typical sharecropping woman kept house
with only a straw broom, a laundry tub, a cooking kettle, and a water pail.
Desperate to make ends meet, African American men took to the rails as hoe-boys or
hobos, hitting harvest time in different regions of the country to earn money. The women
sold chickens, eggs, milk, and cheese. In the end, their efforts freed them from the
sharecropping system.
Guitarist Robert Jr. Lockwood was born in 1915 in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, which was
an African American
family, they owned farms and we was on no plantations except our own. Where I came
from there was a whole lot of black people owned their own everything. Everybody out
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Songs:
- (John Lee Williamson)
- Son House (Eddie James House, Jr.)
- Joshua White
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